“You don’t know that song?” a man asks a colleague in “The Annotated History of the American Muskrat,” one of the more whimsically titled plays of the summer. “It’s an old song. About muskrats. It’s terrible.”

He’s referring to “Muskrat Love,” the Captain & Tennille hit from 1976, the kind of earworm that can infest your head for days after you’re reminded that it exists. (Sorry about that.) But John Kuntz’s “The Annotated History,” part of the Ice Factory festival at the New Ohio Theater, may make you think more fondly of the song — if only because a surprisingly charming acoustic performance of it here provides a rare moment of artistic clarity amid a lot of jumble and sprawl.

Beginning with a creation myth that casts the humble muskrat as hero, the play opens in a room filled with eight beds, a sleeping figure in each. These people are subjects of a research study — or not. The scenes of American history, mainly from the 1970s, are their dreams — or not. For some reason, likely an affection for the word “muskrat,” muskrats figure heavily.

Presented by the New Ohio and the ensembles Foxy Henriques and Circuit Theater, “The Annotated History” wants to be many things, most of all a commentary on an American Dream that has morphed into a nightmare of gun violence and constant surveillance. But what it often feels like in Skylar Fox’s staging, which uses the beds and white linens as scenery and props on Adam Wyron’s blue and red set, is a slumber party where sketch comedy has broken out.

According to a program note from Foxy Henriques — the company Mr. Fox founded with Simon Henriques, who plays a plurality of roles in the young, eight-member cast — the artists second-guessed themselves recently as the country was roiled by gun violence and racial tension. They worried that parts of the show might be “too potent.”

The gun bits are fine; one startling tableau is as disturbing as it is visually poetic. Elsewhere, though, there is a heavy scent of white male privilege. Calling attention to that, by having the sole black cast member (Jared Bellot) deliver a monologue on race while he applies blackface, only raises the question: Why is the cast so homogeneous?

Men, meanwhile, play roles like Pat Nixon (Justin Phillips) and Queen Elizabeth II (Sam Bell-Gurwitz). Betty Ford (Molly Jones) gets a female actor, yet the show pursues a cheap laugh in the way it mentions the real Mrs. Ford’s mastectomy.

Still, “The Annotated History” is a play that’s worried about America. But it’s dreamlike in the wrong way: overlong, confused and too evanescent to make a lasting impression.

Ice Factory Festival 2016: The Annotated History Of The American Muskrat